The ability to provide directed or targeted message delivery to users based on network access is of critical importance to content providers, such as online advertisers. Traditional means of mass communication, such as radio and television broadcast all accommodate some degree of customized content delivery for ads and messages targeted at a localized group of consumers, even in the context of widely distributed or nation-wide programming. For example, in-band message delivery, such as used by television and radio networks, allows for the insertion of localized ads between national ad slots or content. This targeted content delivery is made possible by the control of localized content by local broadcasters within a distinct area, such as a city or state.
In the context of wide-scale global computer networks, such as the Internet, in-band message delivery techniques are not applicable since content is essentially provided point-to-point between a very large number of individual users and content providers, with no intermediate distribution control. Within the framework of Internet Protocol (IP) communication over the Internet and the World Wide Web, certain mechanisms have been adopted by content providers to tailor content to specific classes of users. During a typical web browsing session a user on a client computer will access content on a server computer through a GET request that specifies the network address of relevant content. Typically this involves providing the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of a web page of interest on the destination site. The content provider server computer then serves the page through a POST operation. Existing systems and methods of processing network requests often include components that obtain valuable information about client devices or the users that initiated the requests. Such components generally employ, or at least obtain or process personally identifiable information (PII) regarding a specific user associated with the request and may rely on mechanisms such as HTTP (hypertext transport protocol) cookies as a foundation of that information. Web cookies are parcels of text sent by a server to a web browser that are sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. They are used to authenticate, track and maintain information about users, such as site preferences or contents of electronic shopping carts. Cookies suffer from several disadvantages, such as concerns regarding Internet privacy and the ability of users to disable or erase cookies during browsing sessions. Moreover, the information provided by cookies may not be very accurate, and does not often identify or profile a user to a sufficient degree that allows a content provider from serving directed content to the user.
Present methods of delivering content also have several drawbacks relating to user profiling. For example, because most websites can only mark the behavior of users that have visited the site, they only gain a compartmentalized view of the user based on the website's limited past experience with the user. Users are also required to visit the particular website that set the cookie, or other marker, before it can be used to deliver any targeted content. Because of limitations of cookie technology, online content providers typically do not determine whether the user who is accessing the page originates from a particular location or has a particular demographic background. Such location and demographic information can be very valuable in determining the type and frequency of directed content that should be served to users during a web browsing session. Problems of present marker technology are particularly notable in the mobile computing environment. In the context of mobile client devices, cookies and other markers can quickly become irrelevant or hopelessly inaccurate. For example, the content displayed, played, or streamed on a website (e.g., audio, video, etc.) may be drastically different from the statistically consumed content that is distributed and consumed in an offline manner in that geographic area, including the language of the content as well as the genre of content (i.e., video clips, audio clips, ad messages, etc.).
Traditional methods of delivering targeted messages over the Internet have often relied on IP addresses of client devices. To some extent, the IP address of the device provides some indication of device location. The IP address method, however, has proven to be highly unreliable, with some estimates indicating correlation between IP address and location only as high as 60%. Such inaccuracy is due to a number of factors, such as use of proxy addresses, dynamic IP addressing, and other factors. The ever-increasing use of mobile clients will only exacerbate the inaccuracy of IP address based location determination techniques.
Besides user location, user profile or demographic information, such as gender, age, race, income level, consumption preferences, and the like can also be of great value in serving targeted content. Such information however is usually difficult for online content providers to obtain. Traditional methods, such as questionnaires are often utilized, but are not often popular with users, and are not made widely available to all possible content providers. Other less intrusive measures, such as use of historical information, browsing patterns, and marker technology are woefully inaccurate, and raise familiar privacy concerns.
A major class of targeted content providers is the Internet advertiser. However, increased exposure to online ads is leading Internet users to become increasingly unreceptive to traditional advertising techniques such as banner ads or pop-up windows. Thus, advertisers are resorting to more content-rich advertising, where advertising is done more suggestively through content-placement at strategic points in a presentation. Content-rich advertising is effective but demands greater data bandwidth thus leaving less time for content deliverers to process user-profile related information and make real-time targeting decisions. Moreover, with increasing concerns about privacy and data security, a large number of users routinely delete cookies and other tracking information stored on their computers making such targeting decisions difficult, if not impossible. As a result, content servers have resorted to a fixed pool of content that is served up to website-users round robin with little or no effort directed at targeting. Drawbacks associated with present directed content serving solutions, thus prevent such providers with the effective means of delivering truly relevant advertisements and other directed messages to users who may most benefit from such targeted delivery.
These drawbacks also prevent effective and efficient revenue modeling for advertising content deliverers based on inaccurate accountability metrics, such as click-through rates by users. For example, revenue streams often depends on the number of users responding to an advertisement rather than specific receipt information directed to quantifiable accountability of advertisements served to users. Ad networks and advertisers lose revenue because poorly accounted for/targeted advertising generally results in lower click-through rates. This prevents companies from formulating truly effective online advertising campaigns.
In view of the above limitations, there is currently a need to optimize the manner in which targeted online content is delivered. In particular, there is a need to provide content providers with a method and system which enables them to accurately deliver the most applicable content to their users, so as to ensure higher access rates, longer browse times, and increased consumption of media, all in a manner that maintains user privacy and data integrity.